


when we were young

by smallblueandloud



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Canon Rewrite, Episode: s07e01 Asylum of the Daleks, Multi, Polyamory, also amy and clara would have been such bros, and now clara's managed to track him down, background Amy/Rory, but it's pretty background, rose was in a relationship with clara and the doctor, so yes: oswin and clara are now the same person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 07:30:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14848388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smallblueandloud/pseuds/smallblueandloud
Summary: Clara's really not expecting him to rescue her.





	when we were young

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at smallblueandloud for more crying about rose tyler!

Clara doesn’t realize who he is, at first.

_ There were signs that I shouldn’t have missed _ , she will say later, to whoever is her audience at the moment.  _ And I missed all three of them. _

_ Well, I wasn’t expecting to run into him _ , she’ll explain, after the scoffs have faded.  _ All that I knew in the beginning was that he was a strange man and he was going to rescue me. Which was good enough for me. _

_But, regardless, it should have been obvious_ , she will say. If anything, his promise of rescue should have given it away. It should have set off alarm bells when he refused to give her a name, and that when she pressed he only told her “John Smith.”

She’s able to help him, which she might have not done if she knew who he was. Clara stops the Daleks when they’re attacking him by making them think that return to base was imperative. It didn’t take very much effort, and she’s helping him rescue her.  _ I didn’t regret it _ , she’ll say.  _ I don’t regret it. _

He does stop for a moment, once he sees her for the first time, but she’s too busy packing up her few possessions to really pay him any mind. She thinks that he’s amazed by the arrays of equipment that she has and doesn’t give it more thought than that, since she’s trying to figure out what to take with her and what to leave.

_ That pause was the second sign _ , she’ll say later.

She’s hardly finished pulling her things together before he’s closed his hand around her wrist and pulls, pulls her out of the place where she’s lived for a year, and then circles around and pushes, urging her to go faster, faster.

“What’s the hurry, Chinny Boy?” she asks, trying to stop and give him a wide smile, but he’s not even looking at her.

“The nanobots in the air, Clara, and also the fact that you’ve allowed them to blow up the planet,” he says, not even out of breath, and she frowns as she hurries to keep up. The sentence gives her pause, for a second, before she pushes it out of her mind with the thought that energy is better spent running.

_ I never told him my name _ , Clara will explain later.  _ That’s what was bothering me. It was also the third sign. _

They rush into a room where there’s some sort of teleport pad, and there’s a human couple, kissing quite enthusiastically.

Clara hurriedly averts her eyes. “Who are-” The two break apart, the guy gasping for air, as the woman turns to Chin and says, “Oh, come on, Doctor, don’t we need to go?”

Everything stops.

He -  _ no, not just anyone anymore, it was  _ the Doctor, Clara will say - pulls her onto the teleport pad, and grabs something out of the man’s hands. Clara has the distant impression that they’re being teleported, but her brain is feeling all foggy and all she can think of is an ex-girlfriend who’s been trapped in an alternate universe for years and the man that said ex-girlfriend was in love with.

The Doctor moves to the door, the couple starts kissing again, and Clara finally looks around and realizes where they are.

It looks different, just like he does, but she could recognize the inside of the TARDIS anywhere and anytime. Rose lived there, for two years - of course she can identify it.

Outside, she can hear hundreds of Daleks threatening him, and she smiles, turning to the console. The ship had always liked Rose, and Clara by extension, the few times that she’d been inside. Clara has a feeling She’ll help her on this one.

Sure enough, she hacks into the Dalek hive mind easily and presses the equivalent of the enter key, listening to the beginnings of “Doctor Who?” outside.

The Doctor pokes his head in, ignoring the couple snogging quite enthusiastically a few feet to the left of her. “Was that you?”

“It was, actually,” she says, spinning around from the console to face him, and adds, “I want to talk to you, you know,” before he can duck his head out again.

“I know,” says the Doctor, looking slightly green at the prospect, and then bids a hasty exit. Clara turns and examines the inside of the ship more closely. It’s beautiful, although she misses what it used to look like.

The couple eventually stops kissing, and the woman slowly turns to Clara and looks her up and down. “So you’re the one who was playing opera music?”

“Yes,” says Clara. “You’re the two who are travelling with him?”

“Yes,” supplies the man, leaning out from behind the woman. She sticks out her hand. “Amy Pond, and this is Rory Pond. And you are?”

Clara smiles at the man’s squawk of protest (at the names, she presumes) and shakes Amy’s hand. “I’m Clara,” she says, as the Doctor bounds back in and dances around the console, making the motions of takeoff.

Clara crosses her arms, and turns to the Doctor. He’s fiddling with something on the console, but she looks up at the ceiling expectantly and a stray spark zaps him.

“Hey, I was working on that!” he says, glaring at the center column.

“Ahem,” says Clara, and Amy turns to the Doctor, who has spun towards them but is still trying to look busy.

“Doctor, shouldn’t you be taking her home?” asks Amy. Clara smiles to herself, briefly, before taking a deep breath. He’s not going to get rid of her that easily.

“Yes!” says the Doctor, punching his hand into the air. “Yes, excellent idea, Pond! Clara, where do you want to-”

“I never told you my name,” interrupts Clara, and he stops short. “If we were strangers, you wouldn’t have grabbed my wrist like that, and honestly,” she continues, “who wouldn’t recognize the inside of the TARDIS? Did you honestly think I wouldn’t realize who you were?”

The Doctor stares at her.

“No,” he says eventually, looking very tired. “No, I didn’t. Hello, Clara. It’s good to see you again.” She smiles, just barely. “Hello, Doctor. It’s nice to see you haven’t gone out and died.”

Amy coughs, rather loudly. Her husband behind her - Rory, she thinks his name is - begins to retreat towards the corridor leading to the rest of the ship, but Amy’s hand shoots out and grabs his hand, stopping him. She purses her lips, and puts her other arm on her hip.

“What is going on?”

“Ah,” says the Doctor, “you see, Clara was- is- well...”

“He was my partner’s partner,” Clara interrupts smoothly. Then she hastens to clarify: “The dating- and-in-love kind of partner, not the business partner or any other kind.”

Amy drops her husband’s hand in surprise. Rory’s mouth is hanging open.

“Yes, well- yes,” concedes the Doctor, looking like he’d rather be anywhere but in the very spot he was in. Despite how difficult this conversation is bound to be, she can’t help but be pleased at how flummoxed he looks.

“She was- trapped, somewhere,” she continues, bracing herself for the emotions that always came when she talked about Rose, “but before that, she travelled with the Doctor for about two years. Sometimes I came along. Most of the time they were on their own.”

Silence. The two companions still look shocked, and the Doctor just stares at her.

“They took Mickey along several times, even,” says Clara, quirking her lips, trying to lighten the mood. Still nothing.

She stands there for a minute, before shaking her head and picking up her bag full of her only worldly possessions. “I left a pair of shoes in here, once. It was a good pair of shoes. Do you know where it is?”

Clara’s addressed the question to the Doctor, but it’s the TARDIS that answers, by making the shoes in question fall down rather noisily right in front of her. She picks them up and straightens up, looking at the three people in front of her.

“Really nothing to say?” she asks, stuffing them into her bag. Amy shakes herself, finally, and then gets an idea. “Hold on,” she says, and then turns to the Doctor. “Does that mug in the kitchen belong to her? The bright pink one, with the yellow polka dots? The one that you always get sad when you look at it?”

“...Yes,” says the Doctor eventually, and Clara feels a pang of sympathy. Missing Rose isn’t so much a feeling as it is a state of being, and getting thrust into or reminded of it without warning is disorienting, to say the least.

She has a few things to say to him, maybe more than a few, about how he just disappeared out of all of their lives, and how the only reason that she knows anything about Rose is the sudden reappearance of Mickey, along with an introduction to Dr. Martha Jones and Donna Noble.

Rose was there, for the planets in the sky, and the Doctor saw her, but no one told Clara and she spent the whole time looking after all of the neighborhood kids because she’d figured it wasn’t safe for anyone to be outside at the time.

Apparently, Donna defeated the Daleks with help from some Time Lord intelligence and some lengthy distractions on the part of Rose, but that was all anyone knew for about two weeks, until Mickey tracked down the Doctor and sat with him long enough to get the fact that Rose was gone, again, out of him.

At that point, Clara had asked Jack to fire up his newly-fixed-but-don’t-tell-the-Doctor vortex manipulator and drop her on a planet somewhere - anywhere - other than Earth. That was how she’d gotten that job with the cruise line.

She has plenty of things to berate the Doctor for, plenty of things to blame him for, plenty of requests to make and messages to relay and old companions to remind him of.

She and the Doctor have a capital-H-history and she knows that they’re the only two that can fully understand how the other feels. Rose changed both of their lives, after all. Now that she’s gone, all that’s left for them to do is pick up the pieces. Clara’s pretty sure that the only way that they can get closure, now, is to talk to each other.

_ But he looked like the oldest man in the world at the time _ , Clara will say, thinking back to the look on his face.  _ He has all the time in the world, and I had no pressing appointments at the time. It could wait. _

_ Not everything could, though _ .

Clara winks, very slowly and deliberately, at the Doctor and relishes his sudden look of pure terror before she turns to Amy with a smile on her face

“Did you know,” she says, ( _ I like to think that the conversation with Amy was my reward for surviving a Dalek planet for an entire year _ ), “that the Doctor used to have giant ears?”

“Really?” asks Amy, looking suddenly delighted and like she knows exactly what Clara’s up to. “Do tell me more.”

_ And I did. _

  
  



End file.
